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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey everyone, you're listening to TED Talks Daily, the show where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Welcome back to my top 10 TED Talks, our first ever podcast playlist where we share a curated list of TED Talks from the archive on this feed all at once. We're going back a decade for this next one.
So far back, in fact, that it precedes the birth of this podcast, which started in 2014. But after reflecting on what it means to consider our future selves with Dan Gilbert and Shankar Vandantam, I can't think of a better talk to share next than the one from poet Sarah Kay. It's her first ever TED Talk and performance, and it's from 2011.
Sarah was in her early 20s when she performed this beautiful, gut-wrenching poem called... If I Should Have a Daughter. I find the words and the performance of this poem so moving and especially meaningful to me since I do have three daughters myself. But this is the sort of piece that will hit you whether you're a parent or not.
To this day, it remains one of the most prescient talks I have ever heard. And if you haven't heard this one before, you might want to have some tissues handy.
If I Should Have a Daughter Instead of mom, she's going to call me point B. Because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint the solar systems on the backs of her hands. So she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, oh, I know that like the back of my hand.
And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
There is hurt here that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried.
And baby, I'll tell her, don't keep your nose up in the air like that. I know that trick. I've done it a million times. You're just smelling for smoke, so you can follow the trail back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else, find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Sarah Kay's poem 'If I Should Have a Daughter'?
When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape.
When your boots will fill with rain and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it's sent away. You will put the wind in winsome. Lose some. You will put the star in starting over and over.
And no matter how many landmines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am... Pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
Baby, I'll tell her, remember your mama is a worrier and your papa is a warrior and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more. Remember that good things come in threes and... So do bad things and always apologize when you've done something wrong, but don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.
Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing. And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. It can be about whatever you want. Technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast. The only rule is don't think too hard. Okay, ready? Go. Okay. So here are three things I know to be true.
I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that a good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, although not necessarily in that order. I know that I am incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool. And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke. Why was the scarecrow invited to TED?
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Chapter 3: How did Sarah Kay's early experiences shape her poetry?
Okay, so these are three things I know to be true. But there are plenty of things that I have trouble understanding. So I write poems to figure things out. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, oh, that's what this is all about.
And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it. Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.
When I was a freshman in high school, I was a live wire of nervous hormones. And I was underdeveloped and overexcitable, and despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken word poetry. I felt that my two secret loves, poetry and theater, had come together and had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know, so I decided to give it a try.
My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant. and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me.
The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off stage, I was shaking. I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead, she just nodded at me and said,
I really felt that, thanks. And lightning struck. I was hooked. I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open mic, and my bewildered but supportive parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. I was the youngest person there at least a decade.
But somehow, the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about. In fact, they welcomed me. And it was here, listening to these poets share their stories, that I learned that spoken word poetry didn't have to be indignant. It could be fun, or painful, or serious, or silly. The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom.
and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well. Never mind the fact that I was 14. They told me right about being 14. So I did, and stood amazed every week when these brilliant grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me, hey, I really felt that too. Now, I can divide my spoken word journey into three steps.
Step one was the moment I said, I can. I can do this. And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie.
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Chapter 4: What lessons does Sarah Kay share about vulnerability and self-expression?
Step two was the moment I said, I will. I will continue. I love spoken word. I will keep coming back week after week. And step three began when I realized that I didn't have to write poems that were indignant if that's not what I was. There were things that were specific to me. And the more that I focused on those things, The weirder my poetry got, the more that it felt like mine.
It's not just the adage, write what you know. It's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don't know. I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been.
When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken word poetry. And actually, Phil Kay and I coincidentally also share the same last name. When I was in high school, I had created Project Voice as a way to encourage my friends to do spoken word with me.
But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project Voice, this time changing the mission to using spoken word poetry as a way to entertain, educate, and inspire. We stayed full-time students, but in between, we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus.
And we saw over and over the way that spoken word poetry cracks open locks. But turns out, sometimes, poetry can be really scary. Turns out, sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry. So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. And the first list that I assign is 10 things I know to be true. And here's what happens.
And here's what you would discover too if we all started sharing our lists out loud. At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing or one thing very similar to something on your list. And then someone else has... something the complete opposite of yours. Third, someone has something you've never even heard of before.
And fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they're introducing a new angle of looking at it. And I tell people that this is where great stories start from, these four intersections of what you're passionate about and what others might be invested in. And most people respond really well to this exercise.
But one of my students, a freshman named Charlotte, was not convinced. Charlotte was very good at writing lists, but she refused to write any poems. Missed, she'd say, I'm just not interesting. I don't have anything interesting to say. So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list 10 things I should have learned by now.
Number three on Charlotte's list was, I should have learned not to crush on guys three times my age. I asked her what that meant, and she said, Miss, it's kind of a long story. And I said, Charlotte, it sounds pretty interesting to me. So she wrote her first poem, a love poem, unlike any I had ever heard before. And the poem began, Anderson Cooper is a gorgeous man.
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